


despite your heart of gold

by paperclipbitch



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Canon, Gen, legacy babies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-30
Updated: 2014-12-30
Packaged: 2018-03-04 06:53:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2956484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peggy doesn’t mention that she’s played chess for her life against Russian masters and won in more straightforward matches than the one she just played against her godson, over milk and cookies on a Sunday afternoon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	despite your heart of gold

**Author's Note:**

> [Title from _Xxx 88_ by MØ] For some reason I wanted to write this before _Agent Carter_ rocks up and switches all the canon again. Presumably I’m still having all the feelings about Legacy Babies etc. **Important:** I’ve followed the timeline roughly but inaccurately, don’t ask questions about, like, dates. Also, Peggy and her husband never had children, in this version of events. *cough*

**i.**

Sometimes, Peggy thinks that she and Howard have known one another too long. Well, no, that’s not quite right, is it, leaning over the table for Howard to snap his lighter at another cigarette she shouldn’t have; she _always_ thinks that she and Howard have known one another too long, but it’s only sometimes that she believes it with absolute certainty.

“What’s the occasion this time?” Peggy asks, one martini down and willing to attempt a conversation; it can’t be that urgent if Howard’s meeting her in a bar, but neither of them has as much time on their hands as they’d like to have, and their paths no longer cross for casual socialising. They swap phonecalls and erratic inadequate letters when they get a moment, but there’s usually a _reason_ for meeting in person.

Howard shrugs with one shoulder, his mouth still scraping that playboy smile that he wears less these days: the world is darker and well, _married_ , you know. 

“Maybe I miss you,” he says, and Peggy swallows thickly to stop herself choking on her cigarette.

“I have three open missions and a team whose urgent extraction is one phonecall away,” she tells Howard crisply, retreating behind the stiff British manner that she thinks her mother might have taught her, years ago. “I appreciate the sentiment, but I don’t have time for-”

She’s snapping the catch of her handbag closed, already planning which call she needs to make first, when Howard lays a hand on her arm. “Finish your drink,” he says quietly. “Please.”

Peggy misses him too, though she’ll never say as much; Howard helps with SHIELD when she needs him to, but she can hardly keep Stark Industries on retainer, and they’re rarely in the same state at the same time, both too busy with these lives they’ve built themselves for something so basic as a drink together. She should go anyway, should reclaim her hat from its peg and go while there’s still enough of the night left to ensure that her team are back safe and perhaps grab a few hours’ sleep too. But she does like sitting here with an old friend who knows her more completely than most people do, their in-jokes worn to scraps and patches, their ugly truths buried deep enough that they’ll never bother with excavation.

She drags on her cigarette and flicks a nail against her martini glass and says: “you might as well tell me whatever it is, Howard.”

He knocks back his own drink and says: “Maria’s pregnant.”

The array of emotions that shatter through Peggy are almost a surprise, but she’s not the best in her field for nothing, so her smile is instantaneous if not completely sincere, and Howard looks relieved.

“Congratulations to you both,” she tells him, earnest, and he nods, shell-shocked, as though perhaps telling her has somehow finally made the news real.

**ii.**

Maria Stark is a beautiful woman, soft-spoken and clear-eyed, with an easy smile and a comfortable grace. Peggy is sometimes jealous of her; not so much for having _Howard_ , who is altogether too complicated and frustrating and _far_ too much of an old friend for Peggy to consider him as anything other than what she does, but for having a life Peggy would never want, but can never have.

She looks radiant in her pregnancy, warm and welcoming in her home, and Peggy _again_ wonders how she stands it. Being married to Howard is presumably tolerable enough; he’s handsome and charming and capable of acting like a non-obnoxious human being when he remembers to, but he’s forever working, forever caught up in his own mind. Maria doesn’t look neglected, but there’s a tightness around her eyes that Peggy fears will only spread.

Tea was Maria’s idea, of course; Howard would never think to invite Peggy over to his home, and he isn’t here now, shut away in his workshop. This is for the two of them, playing at social niceties, though they don’t quite fit into each other’s worlds. Peggy sometimes wonders just what Howard has told Maria about their history; about the work they’ve done together, the work they debated doing more of until they realised their paths lay parallel, but definitively separated. 

“Not long now,” Maria muses, one arm cradling her stomach, much too relaxed, in Peggy’s opinion, for someone with something created by Howard Stark inside them. Whether created naturally or mechanically, surely everything Howard touches has the potential to explode. The thought amuses her, but she doesn’t voice it; instead changes the subject to Maria’s nursery plans, Howard’s failed attempt to take up knitting, Jarvis’ efficient yet panicked stockpiles of diapers and baby socks. Howard isn’t the first of their loose little family to have a child, but this baby’s arrival seems like it will be the most fraught: Dum Dum and Gabe both have kids by now, and while the Commandos all rallied around as the potentially most disruptive set of uncles in history, there wasn’t this air of… _something_ around the place. 

Perhaps it’s because there’s _money_ involved. Perhaps it’s, yet again, something that can be tied back to Steve. Most things can, no matter how hard she tries not to.

**iii.**

The tiles in here are an ugly shade of green; perhaps it’s supposed to be soothing, but it isn’t. Howard is smoking and pacing, and pacing and smoking, and Peggy read everything in her files an hour ago. There’s an obnoxiously ticking clock, almost comically loud, and two uncomfortable sofas, and a pockmarked coffee table scattered with magazines several years old. Peggy flicked through them when she first arrived, but Steve’s photograph, his smile bright, his eyes a little bewildered, gazed up at her from the pages of the oldest one, and neither of them need to think about Steve right now.

“How long does it usually take?” Howard all but growls, lighting a fresh cigarette with the butt of the old one.

“Why are you looking at me?” Peggy asks him. 

Howard is smart enough not to bring up her gender here; he merely gives her a sheepish smirk and resumes his pacing again.

The doctors all think that she’s Howard’s mistress, turned up vulgarly to sit like a vulture while his wife strains through birth a few rooms away. They look at her lips and nails, immaculately red as ever, and narrow their eyes. Peggy could correct them, but Maria seems to be the only person to believe that she and Howard aren’t having an affair; even Howard seems a little confused at times, glancing at Peggy with the wrong light in his eyes until he remembers again.

The years since the war have been long ones.

“It’ll be you, next,” Howard remarks, aimless, at some point in the long limbo of waiting hours. Peggy responds with a glare, says nothing. The first slits of grey have begun to appear in her hair, and anyway, she’s never home long enough to keep flowers alive, let alone anything more.

Eventually, the doctors take Howard away, and Peggy sits alone in this room that has seen so many worried fathers waiting for news, and thinks about nothing at all until Howard appears again, eyes bright, and she lets him drag her down the hall.

Maria looks exhausted but somehow as beautiful as ever, as Peggy is handed Anthony Edward Stark, a bundle of blankets with a shock of dark hair. 

“Hello,” she says softly, as he sleepily blinks big, interested eyes at her. “It’s lovely to meet you.” She tucks a finger into one of his tiny fists and he clings on tight, and Peggy smiles and tells herself that her eyes aren’t crowded with tears.

“We were wondering if you’d like to be his godmother,” Howard says, and when Peggy’s head snaps up, Maria nods encouragingly.

“Um,” Peggy says, Anthony Edward Stark still clutching tight to her fingertip, “sorry, _what_?”

**iv.**

Tony is five, the first time they reach stalemate over a chess board. He’s a sombre child with a mischievousness to him that presumably makes him exhausting to live with on a day to day basis, but Peggy enjoys their visits. 

Frowning over a milk moustache, Tony skips his fingers along the edge of the board and then looks up at Peggy. 

“Stalemate,” she agrees. “But you can get me next time.”

She doesn’t mention that she’s played chess for her life against Russian masters and won in more straightforward matches than the one she just played against her godson, over milk and cookies on a Sunday afternoon. That Tony has inherited his father’s intelligence is undeniable: Tony’s already building circuits and rudimentary toys. Whenever Howard calls her to tell her about these achievements, Peggy wants to tell him that Tony’s clever, but that’s not why he’s doing these things; it’s not her place, though, and it’s been at least four years since Howard actually listened to anyone’s advice.

Tony looks at the board once more, and for a moment she thinks he’s going to sweep all the pieces off it onto the floor in some kind of tantrum. Howard, a supposed grown man, has ended chess matches with Peggy that way. But instead Tony wipes his hand across his mouth and says: “you’re pretty smart, aren’t you, Aunt Peggy?”

Peggy takes the question in the spirit it’s meant, and says: “yes, I am.”

Tony nods, and frowns. “Dad’s pretty smart too, isn’t he?”

“He is,” Peggy replies, and waits quietly while Tony seems to assemble his thoughts.

“Then why are you so nice and dad’s so…” he trails off, resisting any of the words that seem to come to mind, and Peggy sighs. She thinks she’s been expecting a version of this conversation for some time.

“Your father is more complicated than I am,” she says, because she doesn’t know how to explain any of this to a small boy. Maybe she should have prepared for this; spoken to Jarvis and seen what he could suggest.

Tony props his chin on his hand and looks unimpressed.

“Yeah,” Peggy says, “that wasn’t very good, was it?” She sighs. “Alright. Your father is a very clever man, very clever, and he creates all sorts of amazing things, and sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. And sometimes he doesn’t know how to handle the things that don’t work.”

Tony looks thoughtful for a while longer, and Peggy thinks about how she’s going to smack Howard in the face the next time she sees him. Perhaps she’ll schedule in a meeting specifically to do it.

“Like Captain America, you mean?” Tony says at last.

_Oh, Howard_ , Peggy thinks, _you absolute_ bastard.

**v.**

Nick Fury is the most logical choice for succession, of course; maybe the only choice for succession. One of these days, Peggy might even like the idea of letting go, slacking the reins a little: SHIELD has eaten the majority of her life and she doesn’t regret a minute of it, but she’s getting slower these days, and the world is still turning around her.

Her littlest sister – the menopause one her parents didn’t expect, who arrived so late that Peggy had already left for America – has had a baby, whose chubby blonde picture graces Peggy’s desk next to the one Gabe Jones just sent her of his latest grandson. Despite everything, she has her family after all. Captain America died, lost beneath the ice forever, but his team, his Howling Commandos, they’ve all kept going, carried on their stories and their legacies and their children.

SHIELD is Peggy’s baby, in a multitude of ways, some of which she won’t even admit to. The baby that turned into a monster, grew beyond her wildest dreams and worst nightmares. Perhaps one day she’ll be able to uncurl her fingers, hand it over to Fury, who is worthy, but perhaps doesn’t deserve to have this dumped in his lap to consume him too.

She’s still brooding about this when the phone goes off, her direct line that only a select handful of people know. It makes her stomach clench and roil whenever it rings, but she always picks it up.

“Peggy Carter speaking.”

There’s a nervous half-laugh on the other end of the line, one she knows all too well. This isn’t the first call of this type she’s had.

“Hey, Aunt Peggy.”

Tony is fourteen now, still awaiting his growth spurt, though his voice has cracked at least. His hair is perpetually messy and he seems to dress in whatever he thinks will piss Howard off the most this week. It’s been a long time since Peggy last spoke to her old friend; Howard has crawled inside a bottle with his own bitterness and pulled the stopper back in behind him. Maria’s Christmas cards are brusque and to the point, no longer with the warm little notes they had, once upon a time. Peggy suspects that Maria has finally figured out what Peggy already knew long ago: the war years broke them all, and nothing’s going to fix them now.

“Where are you?” Peggy asks, brisk, in lieu of the dozen things she should probably say. “And how much is your bail going to cost me this time?”

Tony laughs, an almost real one this time, and gives her a police station address that’s a good eighty miles from his current boarding school. 

“Good job,” Peggy tells him, “next time you might even make it out of the state.”

“That’s the plan,” Tony says cheerfully. He hesitates. “Thanks, Aunt Peggy.”

“I’ll see you soon,” she says, and he hangs up first.

She fishes in her desk drawer for her car keys, the files of their current missions laid out for Fury to look over while she’s gone, and then looks at her neatly framed photos of Sharon Carter and Antoine Triplett, still big-eyed babies looking as innocent as Tony ever did.

“I hope you grow up to be this much trouble,” she tells them softly, and goes to pick up her godson.

**vi.**

Howard and Maria’s funeral is worse than Peggy could have ever imagined it would be. 

The church is packed with mourners; some genuine, some for show. Peggy stands at the back in the stiff black suit she wears for funerals these days, surrounded by all the remaining members of the Howling Commandos. Jim links his fingers through hers on one side, while Gabe is strong and silent on the other. Her family, mourning the loss of another member.

Tony is twenty-one now, but doesn’t look it in his dark suit and tie, his hair newly neatly cut in the way he wouldn’t give his mother when she was still alive. His voice is steady when he gives the eulogy, but his hands are shaking, his eyes bright and wet. Half a dozen times, Peggy wants to walk up there, take the paper out of his hands and tell him that he doesn’t have to do this, doesn’t have to hold himself together for the press who are crammed around the walls. She can feel James itching to do the same, but they all stay still and quiet, because that’s what they have to do. Dum Dum speaks for all of them, in a speech about Howard’s war work that skims neatly over everything that actually happened, the words they’d all actually like to say turned into a mess of blank spaces and missing names. 

Peggy shuts her eyes and thinks about Howard: about the man she knew and the man she didn’t, about the years that tore away more and more from all of them until he was unrecognisable, until her best friend became someone she couldn’t stand to speak to anymore.

After the service, after the wake, Tony is drunk and shouting at Peggy. She’s been waiting for this, thinks she might even deserve it, and so she lets him.

“You could have done _something_!” Tony snarls. “You were his _friend_ and all you did was turn and run and leave him to turn into a _monster_! He destroyed my mom and he- I don’t even know if he even knew he had a goddamn son.”

His voice has shifted, and cracked a little, and his eyes are bright again. Peggy’s chest _aches_.

“Tony-” she begins, with no idea what to say.

“What the fuck did you guys _do_?” Tony asks, sounding helpless, childlike, in a way he didn’t sound even when he _was_ a child. “What happened to you all in the war that left you like this?”

“We did too much,” Peggy replies. “Or perhaps we didn’t do enough.”

The corner of Tony’s mouth twists. “He used to say that too, you know. Of course, it sounded kind of muffled when he was muttering it into a whisky glass-”

That’s when he breaks, and Peggy holds him and murmurs nothings while he sobs into her jacket, the smart black one that has seen too many people buried already. She holds Tony and thinks about his father, who lit cigars for them both when Tony was born and looked like the proudest father on earth, who kissed her with cold lips when Steve had been missing for a month and the world was getting emptier every day, who said _I can’t talk about this anymore, Peggy_ the last time she saw him, two crystal tumblers smashed in the fireplace, something hopeless in his eyes, maybe already gone.

**vii.**

Peggy has received flowers on her birthday every year, give or take up to a fortnight. Sometimes there’s a card, sometimes there isn’t, but she’s always grateful, puts them next to the gifts from Antoine and Sharon. For someone who wasn’t expecting to have children, she seems to have ended up with almost too many. Which is to say that she’s grateful for all of them, and will never be otherwise.

This year, she receives nothing. This year, her godson is missing, presumed dead, in Afghanistan. 

“You know that if we got all our resources out for everyone’s missing family members, we’d never get anything done,” Nick says, but he’s already typing in a half-dozen commands into his computer, everything much more technical than when Peggy was first here, working with pencils and human switchboards. 

“I smoked a cigar with Howard Stark the day he was born and promised him I’d do whatever I could for his son,” Peggy replies, doesn’t blink.

“I heard Howard Stark turned into something of an asshole,” Nick remarks, and it’s only because he’s a good friend that Peggy doesn’t try to smack him. She might be here in a wheelchair because she doesn’t have the energy to stride the halls in killer heels any more, and little details are starting to slip her mind in ways that scare her, but she was director here for a long time, maybe longer than she should really have been, and she still receives the respect accorded to her.

“His son might be going the same way,” Peggy says, “but I still want him found.”

Nick nods, and offers her something that’s almost a smile. “I’m still not offering him that tech contract that keeps turning up in my in tray.”

Peggy doesn’t blink; after all, she taught Nick how to bluff at poker back when he still had two eyes and level one security clearance. “Of course not,” she says.

He softens a little, only enough that Peggy would notice, and says: “you know that he’s probably dead, don’t you?”

Peggy knots her hands in her lap, the fingers stiffening a little more, day by day, without her permission. “I do,” she allows.

Even SHIELD don’t find the cave where Tony Stark builds himself a giant metal suit and changes the world forever. She does find out that he’s survived before the press does, though, and by the time the press conference showing her godson battered and alive airs, Peggy has cried through all her tears and can watch clear-eyed as he announces that he doesn’t want to produce weaponry anymore.

“Well, he’s never boring,” Sharon observes, sipping tea in the chair beside Peggy’s bed. She graduated from SHIELD Academy last summer, is spending a few days with her aunt before she goes back to missions that they both pretend are too classified for Peggy to know about. They would both like Sharon to get by in SHIELD on her own merits, and not just on her name. There’s a reason Antoine managed to scrape through his own Academy years without bringing up his own Howling Commandos legacy.

“No,” Peggy agrees, and looks at Tony’s battered face, wonders if he knows just how much he looks like Howard right now.

She gets her birthday flowers eventually, with a note scrawled: _better late than never_. They are _terribly_ late though; still blooming on her bedside table while she watches another press conference involving Tony. 

“I’ve got my most trusted man on it,” Nick says, when Peggy calls him all of about twenty seconds after Tony’s _I am Iron Man_. 

“Good,” she says.

When she hangs up, she watches the pandemonium on the television, and smiles almost unconsciously. “Well, Howard,” she says, “ _now_ look what you’ve done.”

**viii.**

Iron Man steps through Peggy’s window late enough for it to be early in the morning. Peggy’s mobility is going, but she still has her hand curled around the gun under her pillow before she realises that it’s him; there are some aspects of muscle memory that she still hasn’t lost.

“Well,” she says, and watches as the suit slides off Tony and folds into a briefcase, leaving him looking tousle-haired and scruffy, like the teenager she was forever rescuing from himself. “You could just have knocked at the front door, you know.”

“I could,” Tony agrees, throwing himself into the chair beside her bed. “But if I’m visiting my favourite godmother, why not do it in style?”

“I’m your only godmother,” Peggy reminds him softly, but she smiles as she does so. “It’s nice to see your suit in person.”

“Shiny, isn’t it?” Tony says, bright and cheerful and showing off just a bit – the little boy who’d bring her crayon drawings, full of accurately-drawn components whose names he couldn’t even spell yet.

“Terribly ostentatious, dear,” Peggy says, patting his hand, and he laughs. His face sobers a moment later, though, and she recognises the expression that flickers across it.

“SHIELD brought me some of dad’s stuff,” he tells her. “Well, Fury did, after he got some kind of Russian spy to be my PA for a while. And then I read some of dad’s files on SHIELD, and it turns out that it’s not some little recent start-up panicking about robot suits and that gamma radiation guy.” Peggy watches him, and waits. “Did me getting nominated for Fury’s weirdass team of misfit toys have anything to do with you, by any chance?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Peggy says, cheerfully stoic.

“Yeah, you taught me that poker face and something about tequila for my sixteenth birthday,” Tony tells her. “Madame Director of SHIELD.”

“I don’t go by that anymore,” Peggy reminds him.

“I bet you do,” Tony says.

Peggy winks.

Tony grins, but he has a point, and he hasn’t let it go yet. “So, you and dad and your organisation built to save the world, huh? You should tell me more about that.”

There’s something in his voice when he talks about Howard that’s never been there before: something calmer, something less like it’s all being strained through the remnants of a little boy who just wanted his daddy to tell him he loved him, that he was proud. Peggy wonders what SHIELD had of Howard’s that managed to fix something quite so broken, but doesn’t ask.

“Do you have security clearance?” she asks, teasing.

In truth, Peggy is spending more and more time in the past these days. Part of her is terrified: she’s always been so in control, so aware of herself, that to have her mind jumbling up her filing is horrifying. Part of her is relieved, though, as things she thought were gone begin to trickle back, more real than they were even when she was living them.

“Screw your security clearance,” Tony says, “tell me about dad running around like James Bond and you as his girl.”

“Well,” Peggy says, “actually _I_ was James Bond, and your father was my girl, if you want to be accurate about it all.”

Tony crows with laughter and leans forward in his seat. “I knew it! Tell me more.”

His face is bright and alive and so familiar it stings: as her godson, yes, but not _just_ as her godson. One of these days, he’s going to come and visit her at one of her less lucid moments, and she’s going to look up at him and call him by his father’s name. She doesn’t know how to warn him about that, or how to gauge what his reaction will be: the boy who has always been so determined to live up to his father, but never to become him. Peggy remembers a Howard that Tony will never know.

Perhaps, for the first time, Tony’s finally willing to meet him.

“Alright,” she says, and waves a hand at the water jug kept near her bed until Tony gets the message and brings her a glass. She takes a fortifying sip, and then begins: “I first met your father just before the Second World War broke out. I was beginning to make a name for myself in espionage, and he had just blown his eyebrows off trying to add rockets to his new car.”

Tony laughs, props his chin on his hands, father and son and little boy and man all at once.


End file.
